Surfing a River of Shit

So the plumbing in my new house shot the crapper this week(end).

It all began Friday (or perhaps Thursday) when I was taking a shower. After doing the routine cleaning, I noticed that I was standing in ankle deep water. Hmmm...I thought; this is no good. So I got out of the shower, dried off, and proceeded to inspect the drain. I was anticipating hair.

Nope.

The drain looked good. So I pried the little quasi-metal doohickey thingy off the drain and looked deeper. It was empty (well, except for the water).

I grabbed a plunger. I plunged. The most curious of things happened. Air bubbles erupted, violently I might add, out of the toilet. I thought that was kind of bizarre, but proceeded with my activities. Eventually a wave of black flaky things began bubbling forth from the plunged orifice in my shower-stall floor. These black flaky things were followed by a morass of vaguely grey globules of soapy skum mixed with lengths of hair that were clearly not mine. Then, from the depths, a gurgle issued from within that ebon portal; burbling forth as it did with a staggered staccato reminding me of the voluminous belching of my otherwise unobtrusive room-mate.

The shower drained. As the water spiraled away, the bottom of my shower-stall was left coated in the primevil emissions previously plunged. I was already late for work, so I left the mess with full intentions of cleaning it when I came home that evening. I had by this time worked up quite an urge to urinate, and upon flushing the toilet, phase 2 of a disasterous situation went into motion.

The toilet clogged.

Again with my peerless plunger I went to do battle with a clogged sewage choking machination conjured in the minds of mad men and splinter bottomed farmers. Three firm thrusts into my slaying of this stubborn creature; it too began to gurgle forth a substance that completely failed to match the color, apparent consistency, or much less odor of anything I had placed within its depths that morning or ever before.

Of course it over flowed.

Deftly avoiding the wave of advancing sewage while simultaneously flipping the fan on I abandoned my trusty tool of toilet melee and grabbed for a stack of towels that I secretly hoped would be stain resistent. I tarried long enough to be sure that the flow would stop, popped a window, closed the door, and made for work. I called the landlord as I exited the premises in order to get a plumber. At this point, I did not encourage him to dispatch them with any degree of major importance. I figured it would wait through the weekend.

Sunday morning I slept in.

As I stumbled into the houses primary living quarters, my brother Kid Toke informed me that the Other Bathroom had joined the ever-growing Plumbing Revolution. He then proceeded to describe to me his own epic conflict with things from the depths of the city sewer. Knowing my brothers patience was somewhat lower than mine, as well as his attention to detail, I knew then that this was going to be bad.

I opened the door to the room containing the latest piece of offending mechanism to join the uprising, and was immediately set upon by the inequities of a stygian stench so foul as to be completely unumaginiable to modern man. Closing the door immediately and choking down my stomachs own brand of detritus and expulsion, I made to call the land lord and raise the priority level of this virulent condition. Checking down stairs, I found that bathroom suffering from similar symptoms.

The plumber arrived about twenty minutes later.

One hour after that, I was standing at his side attempting to aid him in fending off an ever encroaching wave of liquid shit and other human biproducts as they oozed from the wall much in the same slow calculating unstoppable determination as the snot that oozes from the nostril of a 4-year old child on a cold wintery day. He was trying his best not to bath in the stuff, I was trying to save my carpet and walls. We largely succeeded.

Then, he began running his machinery again and I stood by with jaw agape as I witnessed him pull from the lines not one, not two, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 metric ass-loads of aging used tampons, soiled Q-tips, a dish-rag or two, and I am not sure but I think a pair of womens panties. I assure you, none of the aforementioned items belonged to any current member of my household.

The plumber explained to me that this stuff was all very old and that apparently whatever debris that had washed down with the last flush of the toilet had been the veritable straw in the camels back. Apparently, the previous tenents of this particular demesne saw the toilets as a reliable back up to the trashcan. Nasty stuff, I assure you.

One funny thing from all of this has emerged though. I did pick up some hip plumber slang. He told me that tampons are the worst thing for a drain, followed only by Q-tips.

His word for tampons was "sewer-mice".

Until I am cleansed, I am...

Son o f Simp